FoodShare

Inspiration

With a growing world population and limited space, saving food and improving efficiency is critical to maintaining our lifestyles. For perishable items, such as milk, supermarkets throw the product if it is about to expire in a few days whereas it could have been used to fill a stomach. At HackTJ, we realized that if supermarkets did not want to share close-to-expired products, they could donate it to others. That is why we decided to create a website by ourselves.

What it does

We decided to create a web application that would connect charities and supermarkets to improve distribution of food and minimize waste. This would help charities by getting the same food for cheaper and the supermarkets for not completely wasting products in their stores. In exchange, the supermarkets have the opportunity to file for a tax deduction.

How we built it

Coming into the hackathon, we had a few ideas in our mind but did not know which one we were going to do. After attending a few workshops, we started to create a storyboard and filled in some parts with pseudo code and algorithms. The planning process took a little more than one hour and we spent the rest of the time researching, coding, and editing the code. We took several short breaks during the process. Some of the new concepts used in this application include html, CSS, MapBox, and JavaScript.

Challenges we ran into

We were looking into creating accounts for users by using the Firebase database but we could not figure out how to create and link accounts to the program and JavaScript. Even after talking to several mentors and seniors, we did not know how to program the Firebase to create a functioning database. Unfortunately, we did not have the time to further investigate this resource. Another difficulty we incurred was accessing certain encapsulate fields in JavaScript. We are proud to say we were able to overcome it with research and guidance

Accomplishments that we're proud of

After attending the MapBox and JavaScript workshops, we successfully implemented the MapBox studio to pinpoint locations on a map and also were able to code a decent website from scratch by using HTML, JavaScipt, and CSS. Even though they were new topics for us, we were able to learn the general concepts of the languages and successfully implement the website using those languages.

What we learned

Apart for the aforementioned new languages and resources we used, we also learned to take periodic shifts as a team to maximize productivity. Though the process was slightly tedious, we were able to effectively start a website from scratch.

What's next for foodShare

At the moment, our website is a prototype - it is not connected to a database and so users cannot make accounts yet. The next step would be using a database in order to bring full functionality to this application. In addition, the map can not pinpoint nor show nearby locations of the user in relation to charity and donor locations. We would also like to expand the capabilities of the account to use conversational UI between donors and charities.